Associate Editors: Wolfgang BEHR University of Zürich, Yueguo GU Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Zev HANDEL University of Washington, C.-T. James HUANG Harvard University and James MYERS National Chung Cheng University

The Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics offers a systematic and comprehensive overview of the languages of China and the different ways in which they are and have been studied. It provides authoritative treatment of all important aspects of the languages spoken in China, today and in the past, from many different angles, as well as the different linguistic traditions they have been investigated in.

Old Chinese (OC; also "Archaic Chinese" in the terminology of Bernhard Karlgren, c. 1250 BCE to 206 BCE) was an isolating language lacking the inflectional morphology that characterizes Indo-European (IE) languages (e.g., declensions of nouns for case/number, conjugation of verbs for person/number/tense/mood). In OC only word class and word order determine a word’s role and meaning in a sentence. Attempts to classify the OC lexicon in terms of IE word classes (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, transit…

1. Background Broadly speaking, Old Chinese phonology (
Shànggǔyīn 上古音) is the sound system of Old Chinese, the language of the early first millennium BCE that underlies the rhymes (=rimes) of the
Shījīng 詩經 (the
BookofOdes) and the system of phonetic elements in the early Chinese script. An early stage of this language can be assumed to be the ancestor of all later attested forms of Chinese. Scientific investigations into the phonology of Old Chinese began in China as early as the Sòng period (960–1279), undergoing brilliant developments in the Qīng dynasty (1…

This lemma summarizes the principle characteristics of Old Chinese word order from the late Spring and Autumn period to the end of the Warring States period (c. 6th-3rd centuries BCE), with special attention to those characteristics which differ noticeably from modern Chinese varieties. It also touches upon some changes which are in evidence in early Middle Chinese texts of the Hàn period. 1. Basic Word Order Old Chinese had the same basic word order found in the modern varieties. Unmarked declarative clauses were SVO, with objects and other internal arguments…

This lemma expands on the information provided in the complementary account by Aldridge (Old Chinese Syntax: Basic Word Order), which addresses a Greenberg-style concept of “basic phrase order” (viz. VO vs. OV), citing data from major clausal (e.g., questions) and phrasal constructions (NP modification, nominalizations, etc.). Here, we elaborate on that description of Old Chinese phrase ordering, decoupling it from Greenbergian concerns to treat other areas of the syntax, those concerned with re…

Onomatopoeia (
nǐshēngcí 擬聲詞 or
xiàngshēngcí 象聲詞) are mimetic or “echoic” words (Chapman 1984:38) and expressions like
hiss (in Mandarin
xū 噓),
snort (
háo 嚎), and
bang (
pēng 砰) that are used to imitate the things or, more accurately, the sounds they refer to (Preminger and Brogan 1993:860). Classifications according to type of sound distinguish between the mimicry of human vocalizations, such as the ejections
eek! and
ow! (
āiyō 哎喲), bodily sounds like
groan or
grumble (
gūlūlū 咕嚕嚕) and the
pitter-patter of running feet (
jījīgāgā 嘰嘰嘠嘠), sounds produced by animals, such as
woof or
bow-wow …